Colin Kaepernick is a walking, wobbling, talking symbol of all the things the 49ers have mismanaged and bungled

* This is an amalgamation of an earlier blog-item, plus some new thoughts, turned into a column for the paper, re-turned into a blog-item/

Colin Kaepernick is a dizzy and solitary soul stuck in the middle of everything right now, and he is trying to be as honest about it as he can.

The 49ers quarterback is stuck between letting loose and playing safe, stuck between the previous system and the new one, and stuck on a team that no longer knows what it’s doing on offense.

There are dozens of things wrong with the 49ers this season and surely many more could spiral out of control in the next few weeks.

But Kaepernick’s collapse is their most grievous problem and most devastating product of the team’s mismanagement… and his explanation this week was as revealing as it gets.

He can’t be as careless as he was two weeks ago when he threw four interceptions in the humiliating loss toArizona.

But he also can’t be as cautious as he was last Sunday in the comatose loss to Green Bay.

So, at 27, in his fourth season as the 49ers starter, heading into Sunday night’s game in New York against the Giants, Kaepernick is stuck in this desperate situation, playing poorly, watching the losses pile up, and basically alone.

“I put our team in a bad situation in the Arizona game,” Kaepernick said. “I wasn’t going to allow that to happen again.

Again: Kaepernick is largely responsible for his own play—he has come into a rough patch and regressed wildly, which is not what good QBs do.

But 49ers owner Jed York and general manager Trent Baalke set this all in motion.

Let’s list the specific ways York and Baalke helped to break Kaepernick’s confidence and destroy their QB position this season:

1. As he plotted to fire them both last season, York didn’t understand what Jim Harbaugh and former offensive coordinator Greg Roman meant to the QB spot and Kaepernick most especially.

You can explain it any way you want, and let’s guess that ESPN’s Trent Dilfer (friends with both York and Baalke) had some input here.

But York and Baalke put Kaepernick’s future in the hands of Jim Tomsula, Geep Chryst, and QBs coach Steve Logan, and do you trust them to get this right?

I never understood what the 49ers’ plans were for Kaepernick this season, other than York’s proclamation that they had a QB who could run it 90 yards every play so they should just let him do that all the time.

OK, that’s straight out of the Mike Singletary era, which, coincidentally, was the last time the 49ers handled the QB this poorly.

You don’t want a QB second-guessing every throw he makes in an NFL game. But that’s exactly what the 49ers have done.

And yes, working with Kurt Warner on pocket passing last offseason seems to have made it worse for Kaepernick.

Actual result: He looks like he’s hesitating in the middle of every throw, trying to think through the release, then re-think it.

That’s the worst kind of in-between for an NFL QB.

Harbaugh and Roman were trying to get Kaepernick to feel natural in the pocket–it didn’t quite take last season and who knows how well it would’ve worked into the future if they hadn’t gotten dismissed.

But now the York-Baalke-Warner-Chryst-Tomsula version of Kaepernick doesn’t look natural doing anything.

That’s not regression, that’s obliteration.

3. While the non-guaranteed $126-million contract was a shrewd deal for the 49ers–because they can cut Kaepernick without much financial stress–it set him up to be their fall guy.

Kaepernick knows this and it’s one more de-stabilizing part of all of this.

4. The 49ers set up the chance to get rid of Kaepernick whenever they wanted, but they didn’t acquire anybody to compete with him or to replace him.

It’s not bad to have a competition. I figured the 49ers would do that at some point by drafting a QB, but Baalke kept taking safeties or injured linemen.

Now they have Blaine Gabbert as their back-up QB and, though they might end up having to play him, if he’s their starting QB by definition they’re not a very good team.

5. One more time: They put Jim Tomsula in charge of the team.

Nice guy. Popular guy. Not exactly the man to fix a QB situation.

Everything the 49ers have done for the last year has been almost exactly the wrong thing for Colin Kaepernick, who is a walking, talking, wobbling example of mismanagement and utter confusion.